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I found this a generous, kind and sympathetic review of my book. If I take up any of the points Ronald Hutton makes, it is in the hope of letting still more discussion on witchcraft ensue - throwing more into the charmed pot - rather than with the aim of wishing him ill. Indeed, we have now paid each other so many compliments that early modern villagers might well be alarmed for us both.

The study of the Black Death has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years. A flurry of articles (including J. Hatcher, 'England in the aftermath of the Black Death', Past and Present 144 (1994)), a selection of sources (R. Horrox, The Black Death (1994)) and two syntheses (this one and M. Ormrod and P.

It is almost five years to the day since I first put in my bookshop order for Richard M. Smith's The Population History of England 1000-1540 (Manchester University Press), advertised for 1992. I kept repeating that order, but Dr Smith's promised book, on which I was relying for King Death, has not been published and has since been dropped from MUP's list.

The only appropriate beginning to this review is to salute a tremendous collective achievement: as a publishing project the book is stupendous and this must owe much to the picture researcher Gill Metcalfe, the OUP production team and the editor; as a parade of high scholarship the book does great credit to its eighteen contributors.

As even the most casual observer of the British historical scene must know, the 'agricultural revolution' has proved both elusive and highly contentious. French 'immobilism', on the other hand, has become something of a commonplace, although explanations for this supposed failure are less consensual. Philip Hoffman's very welcome new book has two overriding merits.

In writing about alien immigrants to England and their reception in the sixteenth century Laura Yungblut has identified a subject that has long cried out for further study, both detailed research into particular features of immigrant communities and broader overviews to incorporate the accumulated wisdom of specialised journal articles, articles often unavailable even in many university li